Edgwyn

There is a use for wine, but not for personal consumption.

While Buffy spent a lot on ending the patriarchy of the Watchers. Even at the end of season 7 it still came down to women with power are idiots and need men to save them:

Then there is Buffy's whole dating all the wrong guys ending with Spike who takes this as a vacation after a hundred years with Drusilla's insanity.

Another perspective on Buffy is that men with power are evil and need a woman to stop them. You can run through the episode guide and find a lot more evidence of a bias this way, if you are looking for biases than you can for women with power are idiots. By season 7, Buffy was suffering from a pretty severe (and realistic) case of battle fatigue, and JW also was giving the rest of the ensemble their chances to shine before ending the show. Buffy still remains their inspiration. While there are indeed examples in the show where men are in trouble because the female characters made the wrong decisions, there are also examples where the female characters are in trouble because of the male characters decisions. If we tell authors that only their male characters can make mistakes, then their female characters become more boring.

As to Buffy's series of awful boyfriends, yes, she could have had the eye candy boy friend instead who just sits around and waits to be rescued. That would have been a major reversal on a trope, but not as interesting as what was actually written. So should a bunch of great stories have been thrown out just so we could have a trope reversal.

I agree with SoT that the YA vampire romance line is creepy (200 year old person dating 15 year old person is statutory rape even if he looks like a teenager) and the whole fall in love with your teacher/mentor/person with power over you situation is bad as well. I kept this paragraph gender neutral, because it is bad either way. Writing a novel where 15 year old female falls in love with her 200 year old female mentor is no better. Writing a novel where strong female mentors strong female protagonist who then goes off to have good and bad relationships with strong characters is a lot better writing, though I am not sure about it being better selling.

Or, you know, the older woman is a good mentor to the protagonist because she also overcame the limitations of a patriarchal society?

 

Dikiyoba.

Certainly, but that reduces the impact of the protagonist overcoming the limitations. Being first is more dramatic.

There is a lot of fiction where a key element of the conflict is a female character overcoming the limitations of a patriarchal society. Based on that, it would be somewhat unrealistic to have a female mentor unless going for an amazon approach. There is more opportunity for a female lead with a female mentor in science fiction since the society portrayed is often more egalitarian than the often deliberately "old" societies of fantasy books. David Webber's Honor Harrington series stars a female who had a male mentor who then proceeds to mentor both males and females. His War God series has several strong female characters, though do to the nature of society most have been mentored by females.

The Darkover series and a lot of Anne McCafferty's works do feature female characters, often as the lead, with MZB's work tending to focus on overcoming the male dominated society.

For tween/teen fiction, the Percy Jackson series and its various off-shoots do not have the "lesser" female falling in love with her male "mentor" but have a lot more of a relationship of equals, despite the inherent male domination of the Greek and Roman gods.

I would take it as a baseline and then around every five years or so. Then if exposed to a TBI/Concussion or similar brain effecting event, the results could be used during the therapy process. Even without the health piece, I would take it once out of curiosity on how I would do. I have the same reservations as to how accurate such a test would be as everyone else, which effects how I would perceive the results, but that does not diminish its usefulness as a baseline of my cognitive abilities to compare to the same test administered later.

I haven't heard the Richard of York one, so it being because you are English would make sense. We of course renamed certain things in the colonies such as "My country tis of thee" replacing "God Save the King".

My problem with letting the Cobalt-60 decay for a while is that while I do not mind the Beta burns, the gamma burns are a lot to ask to get a left handed chunk of nickel.

I remember learning variations of Kings Play Chess on Fat Girls Stomachs for taxonomy (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genius, Species) and My Very Elegant Mother Just Ate Nine Pies for the traditional 9 planets of the solar system. What's nu, c over lambda for the relationship of frequency to wave length. Roy G. Biv for the colors of the visible light spectrum. Knuckle method for the number of days in a month and the 30 days have September rhyme for the same thing.

I would tend to go with Nathalie instead of Jenell due to her ability to put out more damage and more damage of different types. My other two characters were BM and Shadowwalker.

I always liked the flexibility in having six. Your characters can be more diverse then, as long as there are enough good/effective builds. Of course a big part of this is nostalgia, as most of the CRPGs that I grew up playing had six. I think that six or at least five would be quite enjoyable in Avadon where there are five distinct character classes. While A:EftP essentially has only three character classes with the ability to play different races in the later games, you could easily have distinct characters. I do not find role playing the additional characters hard as long as there is enough distinction in the characters which is not a problem in Avadon and can easily be done in A:EftP by not going for the Min/Max approach.

A gate or set of doors that were normally open that are now closed would have sufficed to force us to take the long route in the endgame quest, though it would definitely be too difficult to fix now. As I said above, I am happy with the changes Jeff made in the system for Avadon 2 and the locations of the pylons in Avadon 2.

There was a poll about junk items a little while ago and the majority of respondents liked having the junk items. There is a topic in Avadon 2 about changes to the game and a lot of it is contradictory because for almost every feature that someone hates, someone else likes it. I would be happy to be able to jump right back to Avadon, though it was only in Castle Vebeaux that I found it incredibly annoying. There are some improvements to traveling between maps in Avadon 2 that make it a lot better as far as I am concerned, though not as simple as having a button to send you back.

Good point Triumph

SoT, someone could possibly build an algorithm for the drifting piece. Something along the lines of finding key words in the first post and topic and then rating how many or how few of those key words or their synonyms and antonyms are used in subsequent posts. Obviously that would not work as well on short posts and then would possibly fall off again on long posts, but it could provide a rough estimate of relevance. Interest as you said would be hard to measure, since a fair number of people read all of the posts. You could beef up the likes system so that every reader rated every post, but who wants to rate every post?

Every so often I try to forget what a Reynolds number is and am normally quite successful until I have some reason to study fluid dynamics again. Unfortunately people bring it up in the strangest posts and I have to relive those moments of pain. I much prefer electrons through copper than fluid through a tube.

Under strategy central there is a mod (cheat) that will make the Avadon 1 secret switches a lot more visible by swapping out the graphic for them. I found that it made the game a lot more enjoyable.

I believe that X is researching a new improved thread. It starts with a spell to drop a large anvil on an arena nest.

Training, Charms and Scarabs are all I ever spend money on, but I only play on normal. More potions and scrolls would be very useful on the harder difficulties.

That is my understanding, yes. You need to play the whole way through on hard to win the medal for hard and all the way through on torment to win the medal for torment (The "secret" medals). For the Full of Hot Air medal, it might be possible to turn onto hard before entering the map, fight and win and then turn back to normal later, but I am not sure.

The eye medal is for completing the game on Hard, you should be able to do as many side quests as you want, it doesn't matter if you accidentally become a heart.

From a business perspective, I believe the forums are fulfilling their purpose (why Jeff pays the fee) in that it is an easy place for people to find information, help and hints on his games in a family friendly environment. It will of course only serve that purpose as long as critical ones of you find it interesting, which lack of traffic could certainly threaten.

I am of course a newb, but I think that somewhere there is a wavy grey line that the thread on "Appreciation of Literature" did not cross and the highjacking of the "What do I do about this girl at work" did cross. The trick is of course how to have the emotionally interesting topics without crossing the line.

I read it like Iffy and was expecting something like the recent Nephilim vs Nethar posts. That said, right now I prefer the Sliths, but it has been a very long time since I have played Exile 2 or BofA in order to compare them as allies versus opponents.

He will not speak to you if hunter Salom is in the area. I would try again and see if that resolves it.

And sniped by Randomizer

I logged on tonight and saw what happened to "What do I do about this girl at work" before Sylae did the right thing and put it out of its misery. I now better understand how people could get really high post counts in a short period of time. Of course I am now also much happier with my current rate of around 3-4 a week and the fact that like Darth Ernie real life gets in the way of being on line during post battles.

In any case, I am not sure that the objective is to make you feel that you did something wrong. Ultimately Castor Oil was a nasty dude who needed killing. Unfortunately, there was not a way to get it done without a lot of collateral damage that will end up including a bunch of innocent men, women and children when their neighbors who are only slightly less nasty dudes than Castor Oil get done with the situation. To me, the objective is to see that even doing what is right can cause a lot of suffering and that not every mission is going to end with happily ever after.

Avadon and the Pact just go in, kill the problem and then leave. The other option is to go in, kill the problem, occupy and defend the place, install a new leader and see what happens. This takes a lot more resources and the locals tend not to be any more grateful than if you had just let them all get slaughtered by their neighbors in the first place.

I have to hanned it to you all for how fast this has gone downhill.